William Blake and his Illustrations to The Divine Comedy in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.

“The roadway of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “Excess is the essential vivifying spirit, vital spark, embalming spice of the finest art.”
  2. “Against another desire of his time, derivative also from what he has called ‘corporeal reason,’ the desire for a ‘tepid moderation,’ for a lifeless ‘sanity in both art and life,’ he had protested years before with a paradoxical violence.”
  3. “These three primary commands, to seek a determinate outline, to avoid a generalized treatment, and to desire always abundance and exuberance, were insisted upon with vehement anger, and their opponents called again and again ‘demons’ and ‘villains,’ ‘hired’ by the wealthy and the idle”
  4. “To ‘generalize’ forms and shadows, to ‘smooth out’ spaces and lines in obedience to ‘laws of composition,’ and of painting; founded, not upon imagination, which always thirsts for variety and delights in freedom, but upon reasoning from sensation which is always seeking to reduce everything to a lifeless and slavish uniformity”
  5. “There are many mediums in the means–none, oh, not a jot, not a shadow of a jot, in the end of great art. In a picture whose merit is to be excessively brilliant, it can’t be too brilliant, but individual tints may be too brilliant…. We must not begin with medium, but think always on excess and only use medium to make excess more abundantly excessive.”